ON OPPORTUNITIES TO CALCULATE, ITCHY WANDERLUST, AND STRONG HINTS OF LYNDA BARRY
Friday March 1 2024
Dear Sarah,
About an hour ago I texted you to let you know I was working on my letter and would send it to you by noon or one my time. Then I promptly spent an hour not working on my letter at all! Sometimes I think I have ADHD. I have not tried to get this diagnosed — would I take a medication for it? would a diagnosis change my life? everything changes my life — but I find that I tend to procrastinate even on the things I want to do! I am pleased to sit down to write a letter to you, and I have notes that I wrote yesterday and perhaps earlier this week — I’m not starting from scratch, even though that would be just fine. As soon as a goal is marked as such, I find ways to triangulate myself away from the goal. I sent a non-urgent text message to a friend. I looked up the name of an actor who I thought looked just like a person depicted in an Alice Neel painting I saw weeks ago. I decided to relocate from the comfy spot where I’d nestled into the bed, to my little writing desk where I am more likely to actually get something done — but then in order to sit at the little desk, which is positioned near the window, I felt I should apply sunscreen (my obsession with not having sun or daylight touch my unprotected face) which then initiated a morning skincare moment, and then I felt I must wear warm socks in order to sit at the little table, and now finally I have gotten myself in order and I am typing this letter to you. Two weeks ago you said, "Sometimes I find it hard to begin. And just by writing those words, I have now officially begun!" — and so here is my long beginning!
I am on this self-made sabbatical until the end of March, but I have also just reached out to an organization for which I’ve done a smallish contract job at around this time every year, because it would be nice to take on that one known project and financially float myself a little longer rather than to miss the project altogether in favor of holding a hard line around my sabbatical time. It is a job I enjoy doing and which also has its own sparks of creative inspiration attached. In all honesty I also think that because of my self-diagnosed ADHD, doing a bit of work for someone else will probably help bring me back around to advancing the writing I am doing on my own, nudging me to focus where it’s been hard to focus, in the area of making some container moves and simply starting to edit all the words I’ve written into some shape(s) that would be more shareable with other people. I’ve done a bit of editing and sharing into shorter forms that I’ve thought of as prose poems (you’ve seen some of this work!), but I also think there is some longer work to be assembled as well, and that is both exhilarating and daunting. But one way, perhaps a quicker way around to thinking about this work more intently, would seem to be to put a gentle barrier in place of the free time I have carved out — I love to skirt a barrier in order to find my way back to what I would prefer to be working on. An unencumbered stretch of time sounds like exactly what I want and need — and in fact it has been truly restorative, a reset on my person in general, the opportunity to wake freely and write freely and spend my days freely — but the same issues remain in terms of how I get things done. I am most successful at getting things done when I need to turn from one project toward another; something that must get done must also get ignored in order to get something else done! I am sure there are some fundamental issues here that I could unpack in therapy if I had a therapist right now.
Snack break! I had a string cheese and a rye cracker with peanut butter (this is perhaps not my most desired cracker + nut butter combo but rye crackers are what I have right now) and then a snack dessert of two cream-filled wafer sticks with guava-flavored cream. The wafers are not exactly the best treat I have ever had but they are not bad enough to discard altogether and so I like to munch them while wondering if I am actually enjoying munching them.
Last week I calculated what continuous week it was since we wrote letters ending in December of 2021. Now I will find the piece of paper where I made that calculation. (One more form of procrastination, perhaps, and yet I wanted to share my calculation with you. I love an opportunity to calculate.) We ended on December 31 of 2021, and we began again on February 2 of 2024. In between, there was one set of 52 weeks and then another, and then 5 weeks at the start of this year, for a total of 109 weeks. We ended on letter number 170, and so February 2, while standing as letter number 171, could also be represented as week 279, if we were numbering the weeks in the life of the letters.
Have I yet said in this go-round with the letters that there was a time when I would draft my letter in one document, and then once it was final I would copy it into a new document to send to you? As if I thought you might take the time to see how I had put the document together — where I had begun, where I had made changes, what I had cut — even in the letters, I wanted to send you something that I had decided was solid and firm, as final as a letter could be. A strange sort of thought process at work there, the idea that you would have the time, energy, and desire to make a comp lit kind of project out of some draft of my letter in comparison with the final version. I think I share this to try to express that there are some ways in which I have loosened up over these weeks, and the intervening years. I think the muscle of writing and moving forward has grown stronger in me over the years.
I am returning now to my notes. In your letter last week you wrote of a feeling of indebtedness. Perhaps conversely I could say that my letters have been a wee bit selfish in their length — I have not wanted to edit them down; to write and share them with you is as much a gift for me as it is a gift for you. And yet I do not truly believe it is selfish to send a long letter, just as I do not at all condone you feeling indebted! I love to spin a yarn out of my mind and I thank you for allowing me to send it to you! "A gift is a hostile gesture" (words from your law professor) is an intense statement — while I know and have felt that gifts do create a sense of back and forth, a need for reciprocity, I also imagine that if there were someone in one of our lives who gave gifts from a twisted kind of manipulative hostility, then the gift recipient might be able to cheerfully accept the gift in the full knowledge of how it had been given, without getting caught up in the ticking time bomb of the need to return the gesture, initiated by the giver of the gift. Maybe a circuitous way of saying that there is no such thing as an inadequate response in our exchange of letters!
I love to hear about your poetry class. Poetry does feel like a secret. There are so many different kinds of poetry, just as there are so many different kinds of people. With poetry I take the position of allowing myself to flip through pages and say, That poem is not for me right now, while THIS poem IS for me right now. Lately I have periodically thought about how the fact that academia intersects with creative writing, both poetry and fiction, has felt at times like a barrier to me accessing my own creativity. First, I am glad for classes and degrees that offer opportunities to learn new ways of working and to be exposed to different writers I might not otherwise have encountered. The barrier is not so active now, but I have recently been able to see how the barrier stood as a barrier — I had the sense that if I was not a scholar of poetry or fiction, then perhaps I could not write those things — it was a version of the self-limiting sense that I had to know everything about a thing before speaking an opinion about it at all, or before trying something out for myself. If we all had to know everything before we did anything, then nothing new would ever get done! Much contemporary writing feels to me steeped in literary scholarship. This deepens the secret of poetry for me — there are simply so many poems in the history of poetry, there is so much that could be learned about poetry in its technicalities, so much to be known about how poems have been understood over the years, how poems are judged to be "good" or "not as good" — but lately I feel more comfortable saying that it’s someone else’s job to analyze, to be a scholar, and it’s my job to try to make something. This mindset has strong hints of Lynda Barry in it — words you brought to one of our letter exchanges more than four years ago now — "It makes me think of something I heard Lynda Barry say on Debbie Millman’s podcast recently. She said she once had an art teacher that changed her life with one simple sentence. Lynda Barry had been fretting over whether something she had drawn was good, and the teacher said, “That’s none of your business.” Whatever we make and say and create is no longer ours once it is out in the world; it is ready to take new shapes and meanings in different contexts viewed by different people." As makers of things it is our responsibility to get out there and make! Make your poems, Sarah! I am glad you are making them! I will hope to read them one day!
Now this letter has become long! I have further indebted you! Just kidding, this letter is full of rambles and goofs, and if you are indebted at all I will expect to be repaid in kind. I look forward to reading your words later this evening!
Until soon, much love,
Eva
March 1, 2024
Dear Eva,
I see your letter waiting in my inbox before I have even typed a single word! The fact that opening it will be an immediate reward is an excellent way to light a fire underneath me as I sit down to write you on this late Friday afternoon. I have so much to say!
I will start where you ended, rightfully contesting my disparagement of my own dissatisfaction. I feel the need to shout from the rooftops — I do not agree with that recurring self-critique of mine! It is just that I can now see that it is there, looking at me with the disdain of some annoying country club snob that nobody likes anyway. Disapproval of dissatisfaction goes way back in my bones, perhaps having roots in my own itchy (to use your delightful word) wanderlust as a kid. Growing up in a happy home, it always felt almost naughty to dream of life beyond. I think some of that feeling lingers. Recently, I read Glennon Doyle’s book, Untamed, and one line in particular socked me in the stomach. “Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you.” What a fresh and beautiful way of thinking about the quest for fulfillment. It gives me a very different take on my debilitating post-vacation hangovers of late.
Speaking of vacations, we are going to Australia! I cannot think of a time I have been more excited for travel. The four of us – Team Family, we like to say – genuinely enjoy our time together right now, and there is nothing more pleasurable than an adventure with people you love. I cannot wait. And I am going to put any worry about the inevitable post-vacation slump in a box for later. Here again, the timeless reminder rings true — it’s not time to worry about that right now.
I agree with you that something is different about the letters this time around. We are different, so there is that. And there is also that predictable shift that happens once you have done something you feared. For me, that was ending the letters. Now that it has been done once, and we – and our friendship – survived, the whole endeavor feels more loose and light. And I feel more sturdy.
I also think there was a pivotal crossroads for me that happened during that last stretch of the first go at the letters. I made the deliberate choice to be open about my feelings, my sadness about you wanting to end the project — and to actively let go. This was something that was wholly new to me. Before that, I think I would have either not expressed my true feelings or subconsciously used some amount of guilt to keep you committed. Sheesh, that feels really awful to see in writing, but I think it is true. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say the experience was transformational, though I don’t think I finished the full cycle of metabolizing it until a solid year after it was over.
It has so many ripple effects for me now, including for how I parent. When I think about S and his reticence to disappoint his brother, I realize how differently I see that now than I would have before the experience of the letters. I am able to say with clarity to S: Yes, you feel sad. And, you must follow it through. And to J: Yes, you feel sad. And, you must express that, and not expect anything in return. What a gift to be able to help these little hearts learn this lesson of how to be in relationship with others at this young age, rather than falling into it in midlife like me.
I am also thinking about your statement about the expansiveness and honesty of committing on a shorter time scale. I see this differently. I feel committed on a grand scale, not to the practice of weekly letters, but to you. This is how I think about all of the most important relationships in my life. I cannot commit with any real assurance about something I will do every day or even every year. But I am here for the long haul. By chance this week, I noticed a quote in an email newsletter that said:
"In theory, consistency is about being disciplined, determined, and unwavering. In practice, consistency is about being adaptable. …Find different ways to show up depending on the circumstances…Adaptability is the way of consistency."
This feels like a different angle on the same idea. There is a rigidity that comes from thinking too myopically about any commitment. It is only when we expand our lens and allow ourselves some grace as to how we show up, that we can make commitments that really endure. Or at least that theory is feeling resonant for me right now!
The sun is now pouring into my office window to signal the time has come to wrap this letter. B and I have a babysitter tonight and are going out for Korean fried chicken and then to a Sierra Ferrell concert. An actual date! I hope you have a lovely weekend in your future, and I look forward to reading your words.
Yours,
Sarah